The thesis here is that current hiring practices are biased (often implicitly and unintentionally) against women and POC. Since removing implicit bias is exceedingly difficult, actively requiring hiring managers to hire more people from underrepresented groups is a way to put your thumb on the scale in order to equalize them.
I can understand how you'd see that as discrimination against white men, and if you squint at it in just the right way, it really seems like it is, but what it's really doing is attempting to reduce an unfair advantage that white men have. No, it's not perfect, and I'm sure occasionally a white male does legitimately get discriminated against. But that's a small price to pay to lift a ton of other people out of the status quo of discrimination they're usually stuck in.
The fact is that women simply represent a small percentage of the overall workforce in engineering. The only way you can get parity in representation is to get parity in the underlying workforce. The only way to do that is to encourage women to pursue a career in this industry, but that's not something you can change overnight and I doubt companies care enough to invest in something that may pay off in 20 years.
I'm all for doing things that aren't discriminatory and removing unconscious biases in interviews, job descriptions, and whatever, but that will not move the needle. It's a supply issue.
Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you want to dress it up, and it's never OK.
I'll add that some of my best colleagues have been women. I much rather not work in a sausage fest, but I also don't want to work in a world where active discrimination is supported.
Let’s agree on this 100% and then ask the question: how do we get rid of discrimination? If we have some implicit social bias that is causing a measurable difference in outcome for women, how can we get rid of the bias? If we take it on face value as truth that all discrimination is bad, the no discrimination at all is the ideal. I assume we both agree on that completely. In the mean time, before we’re able to fully eliminate all discrimination, which is better: negative discrimination against women resulting in the outcome of fewer women working and lower pay, or that plus an offset positive discrimination that boost the outcome for women so that there are more in the workforce and the pay is closer to equal?
We can try to push outcomes to be closer to equitable, but the most important question there, I think, is: will the affirmative action actually help remove the original implicit bias against women?
> The fact is that women simply represent a small percentage of the overall workforce in engineering.
That has changed over time, and is different depending on where you live. It went up from 0 a century ago to an average of something like 35% in the 70s, and has declined since then to like 20%. In some countries, the balance is closer to 50% and in a few places, its over 50% - spots in India for example. Isn’t that alone evidence indicating things have not settled, that we can’t rest on some notion that the workforce balance today represents the natural state of things? That we are obligated to ask why, and make sure men aren’t accidentally contributing to the discrepancy? (Especially given that in the past there is a documented history of that happening.)
> The only way to do that is to encourage women to pursue a career in this industry
What if the reason women are choosing not to pursue engineering is because there are still biases, and they know it? Then how would you encourage them?
> Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you want to dress it up
What if the job you’re talking about being offered to a woman is subsidized and would not have been offered to a man either way? Is that still discrimination?
FWIW, that's a claim that doesn't quite match my experience at work, nor of talking to some of the people who implement these programs. Though to be clear, we were talking about widespread mandatory company-wide meetings, not any old discussion on inclusion that happens to occur while at work. We may need to get more specific about which programs we're talking about, they're certainly not identical everywhere. It also doesn't seem to add up when I read our current laws, which are changing over time to emphasize.
> In order to achieve this, companies are activity discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination.
The historical term for this is affirmative action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action), and the idea is to temporarily increase benefits for a disadvantaged group, not to intentionally decrease benefits for the advantaged group. Calling it discrimination, therefore, is a framing that isn't always true, and is somewhat political. It's not always true because things aren't always zero sum. If I choose to give someone a dollar, you don't lose a dollar.
If there really are a fixed number of jobs at a company that is 80/20 men, and the company decides 30% must go to women, then technically yes, that is a form of discrimination. But - just hypothetically - is it a negative discrimination if the reason that the company is 80/20 men in the first place is because it previously discriminated against women, and would have been 50/50 without several decades of history of unspoken discrimination?
It's important to also think about a few things- One, that unlike social prejudices, affirmative action is not intended to be permanent. It's intended to help boost people who've been unfairly and systematically disadvantaged, while they're disadvantaged, and only until things even out. After that, the boost should go away by design. Two, that some of those disadvantages in history have been really extreme, and the kind of discrimination you might imagine you feel when your company tries to hire more women isn't the same order of magnitude of what women and black people as a whole have gone through.
> Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.
Is all discrimination bad always? I'm very discriminating about my partners. I'm not sure that nobody cares, I think some people are in favor of seeing that gender and racial injustices actually go away, since not doing anything about it hasn't worked yet.
